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WASHINGTON — A mysterious trader blew more than $4 million betting on Mitt Romney in the final weeks of last year’s presidential election — in what might have been an attempt at “market manipulation.”

The unidentified bettor bought Romney shares on Intrade, a political futures market that let people put their money on the real-life political outcome, an analysis by two researchers has found.

“This trader could have been attempting to manipulate beliefs about the odds of victory in an attempt to boost fund raising, campaign morale and turnout,” said David M. Rothschild of Microsoft Research in New York and Rajiv Sethi of Barnard College.

The effect was to prop up the value of shares in the former Massachusetts governor at a time when they were dropping on another site called Betfair.

On election night alone, the trader put down $375,000 on Romney shares between 7:30 p.m. and 9:00 p.m.

“This one trader is making a massive amount of trades,” Rothschild told The Post, noting the bettor was essentially saying, “I’m taking all comers,” despite the bad results coming in for the Republican nominee.

Odds on Intrade and other sites filtered into election coverage last year and helped impact the overall narrative of who was on top. Prior political-science research suggests that voters like to be with a perceived winner, in what’s known as the bandwagon effect.

It’s also possible the person simply made a bad bet, or attempted to use the Intrade site as a hedge against other investments, the authors conclude.

Intrade shut down after the November elections when a federal agency said it hadn’t registered as a market exchange.